The legend says Boot Hill cemeteries were filled with gunfighters who died with their boots on. The records tell a sadder story. The first graveyard to carry the name was in Hays, Kansas, a frontier town founded around 1867, five years ahead of the famous one in Dodge City. As the 1800s went on, footwear changed from soft homemade shoes into stiff leather boots fitted by skilled cordwainers to left and right feet. A good pair was an investment that families salvaged and passed on. A body buried in its boots usually meant the boots were worthless, or that nobody was left to claim them.

Boot hills were the frontier’s potter’s fields, resting places for drifters, hermits, and the destitute. When towns grew respectable, families with money moved their dead to newer cemeteries and left the old plots to decay. In Tombstone, Arizona, the graveyard closed in late 1886 and holds over 300 bodies, of which only 205 are recorded. Souvenir hunters carried off the wooden markers, and Hollywood filled the silence with a myth.

• One rival theory traces the name to Scotland, where coronation spectators supposedly stood on boots filled with soil to see over the crowd.
• Many of Tombstone’s unrecorded graves belong to Chinese and Jewish immigrants buried without official record.
• In 1929 former mayor John Clum returned for the Helldorado celebration and could not find the grave of his wife, Mary.
• Gunsmoke opened its first television season with Marshal Matt Dillon walking through Boot Hill, fixing the violent version in American memory.
• The name reached Johnny Cash, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and even cricket, where it is the nickname for the dangerous short leg fielding position.